And Now They’re Shooting at Us . . .

Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot point blank in the head at a Congress at Your Corner event held in a shopping center in Tucson, Arizona today. At this time we are hearing that eighteen others were also shot and that six people have died including congressional staffers, a federal judge and a nine-year old girl.

At this time doctors are optimistic that she will recover, although they have said that the bullet passed through Congresswoman Giffords’ brain.

Gabrielle Giffords is a moderate Democrat who voted in favor of the landmark healthcare reform bill. This earned her a crosshairs painted over her district by Sarah Palin’s Take Back the 20 website.

But don’t waste your time looking for it, they took it down after getting a spike of pageviews shortly after Congresswoman Giffords’ shooting.

You can see a screen grab of it here. It was taken just moments before the website was taken down.

I’ve been listening to coverage of this on CNN since it was first reported there. To say that I am shocked and saddened at this is an understatement.

But then I have to ask myself what else could we possibly expect? We have people vandalizing congressional district offices as a result of their votes on health care. Giffords’ office was one of them.

The craziness that seems to define Arizona these days seems to have been raised to a new level. Arizona has the death penalty for capital crimes and I’m pretty sure that her assailant will end up in an execution chamber someday. But somehow I think that this punishment is too lenient. When the best of us is assaulted by the worst of us, there needs to be a redefinition of what we, as a society, need to do to make an example of her attacker, this supreme waste of organic mater.